Reproduction in extinct animals is notoriously difficult to study, especially when it comes to invertebrates. In a very unusual fossil, scientists have found one of the first examples of sexual anatomy in the fossil record: a small pair of grasping appendages that let the male trilobite hold the female close during mating. Yet despite their abundance, nobody has been able to figure out how trilobites reproduced-until now. “It’s just like, ‘Evolution, go home you’re drunk,’” says Russell Bicknell, a paleobiologist at the University of New England in Australia. To date, paleontologists have uncovered a staggering 20,000 species, sporting every outlandish configuration of plates, spines and horns imaginable. They appeared some 520 million years ago and dominated the fossil record of ancient seas for nearly 300 million years afterward. Named for their distinctive three-lobed body, these armored, pill-bug-like arthropods were some of the first hard-bodied animals on Earth. Trilobites are perhaps the most successful group of animals ever to live.
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